After reading through the thread on this list about the benefits of mounting PORTAGE_TMPDIR as tmpfs, I decided that I will be doing this mount from now on. My total RAM is 4G, but since I only "emerge world" about once per week, I can easily set aside temporarily 2G or more for this purpose.
However, after doing some more reading, I find that some people recommend mounting tmpfs using the option nr_inodes=1M, while others just accept the default value for nr_inodes. To me, setting maximum inodes to 1M seems a bit high. Can emerge actually generate that many temporary files? Would it be safer and also avoid swapping to set nr_inodes=1M or is the default good enough?. Frank Peters
